Making Geography Bear-able

Teacher Uses Teddies To Educate Students About The World.

With summer almost here, daydreams of far-off travels and adventures loom in the air for many children.

But students at Lauderdale Manors Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale already have caught a glimpse of adventure by tracking the travels of five cuddly teddy bears across the country.

The traveling teddies - Brownie, Snowflake, Angelo, Mr. Bearhly and Grisly - recently returned to Beverly Mittel's first-graders as the school year drew to a close this week.

The students had sent them off six months ago with friends and relatives to tour the United States.

The 24 first-graders learned geography by tracking the furry travelers' progress as they made their ways around the country.

"The biggest accomplishment is that [the students) can actually point out states in a map. When they first came in, they didn't have any geography or map skills," said Mittel, who masterminded the traveling teddies idea thanks to a $500 education grant from CitiBank. "I didn't know what was going to happen, but I thought it'd be a fun and exciting way for them to learn."

The teddies soon became school celebrities when postcards from California, Texas, Europe and the Virgin Islands came back with clues of their travels.

"I was excited because I learned about the different places he was at," said first-grader Cherokee Hughes, 7, whose teddy, Angelo, traveled to the West Coast. "My bear was great because he went all over."

To record the teddies' adventures, small journals, carried in their cloth knapsacks, were kept by their traveling companions.

"A lot of these kids haven't experienced traveling, so this is the only way for them to learn what it's like," said Jennifer Ogle, a fourth-grade teacher at Lauderdale Manors. Her class regularly checked up on the teddies' whereabouts.

The teddies' journals report unusual adventures, from sightseeing and eating chocolate waffles in Belgium to helping Federal Emergency Management Agency volunteers with the floods of upper New York.

"It was exciting because most of the bears went to places I want to go and did things I want to do, now that I know about them," said Tedric Chin, 10, a fourth-grader who visited the traveling teddies this week.

Because of the bears' success here and abroad, Mittel hopes to continue their travels next year and is reapplying for the CitiBank grant.

This year, CitiBank Florida and the Broward Education Foundation awarded $29,694 in grants to 59 Broward teachers who presented classroom projects that had innovative learning techniques.